NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE Newsletters . . .
Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty
September 5, 2012
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1. With 'Wrong Track' Numbers at a Historic High, Democrats Pledge, 'Forward, Not Back!'
What is with all the shouting? It is as if every speaker at the Democratic convention was told, right before taking the stage, "Yeah, the whole audio system just stopped working a minute ago. You're going to have to yell your entire speech so they can hear you in the nosebleed seats."
Cory Booker, Ted Strickland . . . by this rate, Obama will be introduced by Hulk Hogan.
Strickland: "Barack Obama is an economic patriot!" Jonah Goldberg, call your office.
Kal
Penn, John Leguizamo, Tony Shalhoub . . . Boy, the Democrats can bring
in the celebrities by the boatload. Not sure it does them that much
good, however . . .
There's
this sense that because of the lousy economy, the Obama campaign and
Democrats in general have no choice but to run an extremely negative
campaign where they spend all of their time wielding rhetorical
flame-throwers at Romney and leaving scorched earth throughout the
country. But first, there's always a choice. If they really had an idea
of what went wrong in Obama's first years, if they really knew how to
fix it, and they really had a good sense of how to get better results,
they could always talk about that. But they don't, so that's never
really seriously discussed.
No,
you get the sense that this approach is deeply satisfying to their
souls. One of the things that I marvel at is the notion that anybody
could really hate Mitt Romney. He hasn't done all that much. (To
some Republicans, that's the problem!) Oh, sure, you can oppose him,
disagree with him, distrust him or be wary of him. But hate him? Really?
Genuine, frothing-at-the-mouth, detesting him? Come on, he's Dudley
Do-Right.
But
the Democrats, from the elites to the grassroots, have managed to
summon the appropriate rage and direct it as needed. From the opening
remarks to James Clyburn to Ted Strickland to Deval Patrick to Martin
O'Malley, all of the Democrats spoke as if the country was on the verge
of a great, epoch-defining change, that if Mitt Romney -- Mitt Romney!
-- were to take the oath of office, the American experiment would come
to an end. I suppose if you've gotten quite comfortable with
public-sector pay and pensions, the "free" benefits of Obamacare, the
money tossed around by stimulus bills and earmarks, and if you have
grown wealthy from an elaborate and complicated system of ensuring
government remains friendly to your business, perhaps it does seem like
the world is ending.
To
give credit where it is due, Julian Castro did come up with one pretty
good line: "Mitt Romney's a good guy. . . . He just has no idea how good
he's had it." It does feel like there's now a paint-by-numbers formula
for giving a speech that garners media raves: My parents/grandparents/great-
Thank goodness the "eat better and exercise more" portion of Michelle Obama's video made it into televised prime time.
I actually
thought Michelle Obama had a really good speech, probably as good a case
as can be made for Obama under these circumstances. Of course, it
barely touched on policy, and was full of personal anecdotes, like
Obama's old car with a hole in the floor, and his coffee table retrieved
from a dumpster, and how the president helps his daughters navigate the
social circles of grade school. Barack Obama might be a completely nice
guy (the tactics of his campaign, and his rhetorical evasiveness and
thin-skinned temperament count as counter-evidence) but as a famous
chair salesman said, "We don't have to be mental masochists," voting for
somebody we don't really want just because they seem like nice guys.
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2. The Party of Ted Kennedy, Now and Forever
Perhaps there's no better, or more symbolic choice, for the Democrats to honor on the first night of the convention than former Senator Edward M. Kennedy.
Here
is what appears to be one of the defining differences between
Republicans and Democrats: Republicans think the fact that Ted Kennedy
killed a woman, or at the very least put her in circumstances that led
to her drowning and took no action to save her or even report her death,
is unforgivable and colors every action thereafter; Democrats feel like
this is some obscure family tragedy where Kennedy is almost as much a
victim as she is and everyone should just avert their eyes and hush up
about it because it was a long time ago.
Guy Benson: "Dems: Romney killed a woman! (False). Dems: We love this guy who actually killed a woman! (True)."
Erick
Erickson: "Democrats tonight: 'FORWARD!! IN REVERSE!! OFF THE BRIDGE!!
Let's get William Kennedy Smith to do a live shot. Of liquor.'"
Andrea Chapman: "Apparently the right 'NOT to be raped' or the right 'NOT to drown' aren't protected by @TheDemocrats."
La Jolla Princess: "So the DNC really gets into gear lionizing the involuntary manslaughter hero of Massachusetts. That's just about right."
MitreBox: "The DNC cares about women, that can swim."
John McCormick: "Shouldn't Democrats have to choose between the 'war on women' theme and adoring a man who killed a woman?"
To
quote a Dennis Miller classic, "Ted Kennedy is the distilled essence of
the Democratic party. Operative word there being 'distilled.'"
And
now, just a few molecules of sympathy for Kennedy; to be born into that
family, and have such enormous expectations thrust upon you, surrounded
by so much tragedy and so many enablers willing to indulge, forgive,
and cover up your worst acts and impulses, seems like a formula for
personal corruption. It's easy for us to exclaim in disgust, fury, and
incredulousness at the perceived Kennedy attitude that the rules don't
apply to them. We react that way because almost all of us spent our
lives being told that the rules applied to us. Imagine being told, from
your earliest memories, that the rules didn't apply to you and then
seeing everyone -- family members, family friends, party officials,
elected officials, members of the media -- all of them jump through
hoops to reinforce the notion that you were special, that the rules
didn't apply to you.
Now check out this paragraph from Michael Kelly's legendary profile of Ted Kennedy in GQ:
Biographers
first note obvious public drunkenness in the terrible aftermath of
Bobby's murder. In April 1969, flying back from a congressional trip to
inspect the living conditions of poor Indians in Alaska, a hard-drinking
Kennedy pelted aides and reporters with pillows, ranged up and down the
aisles chanting "Es-ki-mo power" and rambled incoherently about Bobby's
assassination, saying, "They're going to shoot my ass off the way they
shot Bobby . . . "
You may loathe Ted Kennedy, but I'll bet you wouldn't have traded lives with him, either.
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3. The Minaj Mirage
So, if you're not familiar with the rap/hip-hop star Nicki Minaj, how do I describe her? She is . . . extremely explicit and vulgar, extremely sexual in her image, yet never the same carefully constructed image twice and pretty original. She'll sing whole choruses in fake British accents. She's not a creature of New York or Hollywood as much as she's a creature of Mars. When Lady Gaga begins to look fairly staid and predictable, you can switch over to Minaj.
So, is there significance that in a new rap lyric, Minaj appears to sorta, kinda, profanely endorse Mitt Romney?
If
Nicki Minaj thought she'd send the political world and the blogosphere
into an incredulous swoon with her profane "endorsement" of Republican
presidential candidate Mitt Romney, well, she was right.
Bloggers
and politicos have been swooning for hours today and they're still no
closer to determining whether Minaj is really for Mitt, or whether it's
just another ironic stunt by one of her performing alter egos.
All
those four-letter words in her "endorsement" would suggest the latter.
And the clean-cut, clean-mouthed Mitt Romney, who's more a "Golly!" guy
than an expletive-deleted guy, is no doubt wondering who the heck Nicki
Minaj is. . . .
The best response had to be from The Wall Street Journal's Lyneka Little.
"[I]n
the same rap, Minaj also mentions hanging out with zombies, so it's
hard to say exactly what it all means," she points out.
Ya think?
I dunno, have you hung around an Occupy rally lately?
Naturally,
a zillion calls went out to Minaj and her publicists asking, in less
polite terms, are you serious? So far, no response, and she did not
enlighten via her Twitter account.
But here's the number Romney and his campaign might want to know: She
has 14.3 million followers. Presidential elections have been won by
less. Way less.
I wondered whether this was worth more than a moment's thought, and thankfully EM Zanotti was here to sort it all out for me and better express those half-formed thoughts at the back of my head:
Is
she serious? No, probably not. No more than she was serious about being
taken with a cold during that MTV awards show appearance where she
showed up wearing what appeared to be a bedroom full of stuffed animals
pierced by carefully honed shards of glass.
What
she is really trying to do, though, is what makes her "endorsement"
meaningful. Nicki is trying to shock. As Talib Kweli so eruditely put it
on his LiveJournal, "I doubt Nicki seriously supports Romney. Her
lyrics ain't political. She just wants y'all to talk about her & she
winning cuz it's working!"
Get
that Republicans? It's finally become so obvious to Madonna's army of
heritage outrage-transactors that the real way to get attention in the
press today isn't to do a striptease dressed as a nun or dress in raw
meat. The way to get people talking is to claim you're voting
Republican. It's outrageous! It's different! It preys on the delicate
sensibilities of the liberals prone to meltdown at the mere mention of
Mitt Romney, causing them to lather up faster than a Parents Television
Council president watching a Game of Thrones marathon on mute.
America,
Obama supporters are the new Culture War lunatics. And Nicki Minaj is
playing them like she would a Kid Robot action set.
Considering
how people are still talking about Clint Eastwood, maybe this is the
truth: The last thing that a celebrity can do to genuinely shock people
is endorse a Republican.
Hey, finally Mitt Romney has locked up the support of the Super Bass of the party.
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